Facing flak, IRS 2013 kept in abeyance

Bombarded by strong protests from several media organizations over a number of glaring anomalies in its survey, the Media Research Users Council Board and the Readership Survey Council of India (RSCI) on Wednesday said that the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2013 will be kept under abeyance till March 31.

TNN | Feb 20, 2014, 12.39 AM IST

NEW DELHI: Bombarded by strong protests from several media organizations over a number of glaring anomalies in its survey, the Media Research Users Council Board and the Readership Survey Council of India (RSCI) on Wednesday said that the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2013 will be kept under abeyance till March 31.

The MRUC has set up a panel which will validate the data and present its recommendations to the RSCI by early April. In the meantime, the MRUC has said that subscribers and members should not use the IRS 2013 data.

The MRUC decision comes after its recently released data on readership came in for severe flak from the umbrella association of the Indian newspaper industry, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS). The IRS 2013 was released on January 28 and soon publications began to point out glaring anomalies in the data.

The MRUC appears to have taken cognizance of these protests against the survey findings. In order to rectify this, the council has started developing the process of re-validation of data, which will be complete by February 24. Its statement said that the re-validation process would be over by March 31, and observations and recommendations arising from this process would be presented to the RSCI by early April.

On January 31, 18 publications issued a public statement that pointed out some of the most startling anomalies and also demanded the withdrawal of the data with immediate effect. A statement jointly issued by the newspapers in public interest had stated, "The survey is riddled with shocking anomalies, which defy logic and commonsense. They also grossly contradict audited circulation figures (ABC) of long standing."

Among the anomalies in the survey that were pointed out were the Hindu Business Line being shown as enjoying thrice as many readers in Manipur as in Chennai, and Hitavada, the leading English newspaper of Nagpur with a certified circulation of over 60,000, not having a single reader in the new survey.

The statement also pointed at "wild swings'' in overall newspaper readership across states. While Punjab had lost a one-third of all its readers in just a year since the last IRS, neighboring Haryana had grown by 17% while every major newspaper in Andhra Pradesh, irrespective of language, had lost readers by 30 to 65%.

Saying that there are "hundreds of such anomalies in the report", the statement "urges advertisers and media agencies not to rely upon or use the recently published IRS results in any way". It also called upon RSCI and MRUC, the conductors of the IRS, to "withdraw the results of IRS Q4 2013 immediately and put a stop to all future editions of this survey, as their continued publication will cause irreparable injury to the reputation of established publications."

The INS had met MRUC on February 3 and given the latter an ultimatum to withdraw the data by February 4 evening, failing which members of the INS would withdraw their subscriptions to the data.

Several media companies including Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd (the publishers of The Times of India), Dainik Bhaskar, Jagran Group, Hindu and India Today Group had withdrawn from the survey.

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